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The Literary Life Podcast
Episode 274: The Literary Life of Dr. Anne Phillips
01:43:14
This week on The Literary Life Podcast, our hosts Angelina Stanford and Thomas Banks are back with a new “Literary Life of…” interview, this time with their teaching colleague at , Dr. Anne Phillips. In addition to her classes at HHL, you can...
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- [00:19]
Angelina Stanford
This is not just another book chat podcast. Lifelong reader Cindy Rollins joins teachers Angelina Stanford and Thomas Banks for an ongoing conversation about the skill and art of reading. Well, explore the lost intellectual tradition and discover how to fully enter into the great works of literature. Learn what books mean while delighting in the sheer joy of imagination. Each week we will rescue story from the ivory tower and bring it to your couch, your kitchen, and your commute. The Literary Life is for everyone because in the words of Stratford Caldecott, to be enchanted by story is to be granted a deeper insight into reality. Join us for an ever unfolding discussion of how stories will save the world. This is the Literary Life Podcast. Welcome to the Literary Life Podcast. I'm Angelina Stanford, and here today, along with my usual cohort, I, who am not Peter Hitchens. You are not Peter Hitchens. We are here with a very special guest for our Literary Life of Episode. Please welcome to the podcast, our very own Dr. Ann Phillips.
- [01:53]
Dr. Ann Phillips
Hello. Hello. Thank you very much.
- [01:56]
Angelina Stanford
We are excited for this conversation. If you're wondering why my husband just blurted out I'm not Peter Hitchens, it's because we. The last Literary Life of Episode that we did was with Peter. Peter Hitchens. So, no, he is not a permanent member of this podcast. Sadly.
- [02:12]
Thomas Banks
Yeah, I think that one went really well. I think that's. That's going to be one of our most listened to. Yes, I'm pleased how people have responded to it.
- [02:20]
Angelina Stanford
See, I don't know if that's going to make Ann feeling pressure or feel like no pressure.
- [02:25]
Dr. Ann Phillips
Yeah, that's a lot to live up to.
- [02:27]
Angelina Stanford
None of us can live up to that.
- [02:29]
Dr. Ann Phillips
I don't sound as, like, beautifully sonorous as he does.
- [02:33]
Angelina Stanford
I never felt more like a Southern backwoods hick in my life than talking.
- [02:37]
Dr. Ann Phillips
With him.
- [02:40]
Angelina Stanford
But it was great. But, you know, one of the things that's so great about our Lit Life of Episodes is that we get to see people in a slightly different light than we're accustomed to. And it was a lot of fun for him, for us, of course, but it was a lot of fun for him to be able to talk about what books have shaped him. And so this is a great opportunity for you too, for our audience to get to know you, who they probably already know you around Facebook and around our Discord server and your substack and the webinars that you've done. And this is going to be a chance for us to talk about a different side of you, an important side of you. So you're the literary life of Dr. Anne Phillips, for those of you who don't know who Dr. Phillips is, Dr. Phillips has a Latin and Greek degree from Hillsdale University, and she has a PhD in classical studies from the University of California, Santa Barbara.
- [03:35]
Dr. Ann Phillips
She was homeschooled all the way through high school.
- [03:39]
Angelina Stanford
I cannot wait to talk about your journey from homeschool to PhD. I think a lot of people are going to be curious about that. And of course, Dr. Phillips is now our Latin and soon to be Greek teacher. So, yeah, you have done a phenomenal job. I should say you're one of our Latin teachers because Mr. Banks is also one of our Latin teachers. But you have just done a fantastic job with your students. I'm so proud of everything you've accomplished. And we actually just got the results from the National Latin Exam, so please allow us to congratulate you on the air because your students were all gold or silver medalists, right?
- [04:17]
Dr. Ann Phillips
Yep. Everyone who has reported back has gotten either a gold, silver or gold certificate and that they've worked so hard.
- [04:26]
Angelina Stanford
That is everyone.
- [04:28]
Thomas Banks
Oh, my gosh. Yes. This is. Honestly, I am someone who's not easily impressed by the format, the structure of almost any standardized test. I take my hat off to the people who compose the National Latin Exam. And I think, honestly, I took that exam several times in middle school, in junior high, high school. That's a hard test. And I think it's honestly gotten harder over the years. I was looking at old copies of it online from 2000 versus now, and it seems that some of their readings have gotten more obscure authors, not just standard classical authors, from Lucretius to Juvenile anymore, but some pretty obscure Renaissance stuff and the type of Latin that you wouldn't be able to prepare for easily. So I think that doing that kind of work on the National Latin Exam today is harder than it was when I was a kid.
- [05:29]
Dr. Ann Phillips
That's one man's impression. I never took it. I would have if I knew it was a thing. When I was in middle and high school, I probably would have been all over it. But I didn't know it was a thing. So I was not sure exactly how to prepare the students for it. I very much encourage them to take it, and I was kind of just, let's see what happens, see how it goes for you. And the way I kind of operate with this is they're pretty used to me just throwing things at them and saying, hey, let's work through this. So I think for them, they're kind of used to that already, especially my Latin. Two students are the ones who took that. Next year, I'll have the Latin one students take it as well. Those of them that want to. But Latin II especially, they're very used to me saying, hey, I found this really cool poem from, you know, the 1200s. Let's read that. So they're already kind of used to having things just thrown at them and then looking at it. You know, I've never seen it before. No context for it. So maybe that kind of helped. I wasn't doing that for the purpose of the nle, but it probably helped.
- [06:38]
Angelina Stanford
Well, you know, we knew that you were a very accomplished academic, a legit scholar, and of course, have a great love of the classical languages. And it's just been a delight to see you as a teacher. You are a fantastic teacher. And we already knew that before we saw the silver and gold medals. But congratulations, though, on that. Thank you.
- [06:59]
Dr. Ann Phillips
Thank you.
- [07:00]
Angelina Stanford
That's an incredible accomplishment for you and for your students.
- [07:02]
Thomas Banks
Here, here.
- [07:04]
Angelina Stanford
And of course, there are openings in the said Latin class. If someone's interested in hopping on such a fantastic class, you can go over to our website, of course, HouseOfHumaneLetter.com common you'll see openings in her Latin 1 class, her Latin 2 class, Mr. Banks's Latin 3 class. And also we're very excited to announce that a lifelong dream of yours is coming true because we have launched our Greek program.
- [07:31]
Dr. Ann Phillips
Yep, that is. That is one of my. I love Greek so much. So I'm so excited to get a Greek program going.
- [07:39]
Angelina Stanford
Well, we're thrilled about that as well. And again, go over to the website. You can find out all the information about all of our classical languages. And we're very, very proud of the department that we're building here. This is. This is real language study. This is not Memorize Happy birthday in Latin.
- [07:57]
Thomas Banks
I was just thinking, like, that's not.
- [07:59]
Angelina Stanford
That's not a thing. That's not a thing. No Gimmicky Latin here, Dr. Phil. She will get you real Latin fairy tales, real fables, real. Real prose, real poetry. And we will. You get students reading real Latin so fast. And it is just amazing to me. Of course, that was my favorite part about Latin as well, as a student was, you know, getting to the real stuff. That's the whole point.
- [08:23]
Thomas Banks
You didn't just want to, like, read Goodnight moon in Latin 75 times.
- [08:28]
Angelina Stanford
Let's not let this entire episode turn into us all ranting against how bad all the other Latin programs are. But. But, yeah. Well done to you, Dr. Phillips. Now, this is Usually the part in the podcast where I say, let's talk about the upcoming events we have coming up. Well, that's. I'm a master of the English language, clearly. But in this case, the upcoming event to promote is your upcoming event. So May 5th through 9th, we've got something pretty exciting. Dr. Phillips is teaming up with our Inkling Scholar, Jen Rogers for a fantastic mini class called the Great Dividend. Plato, Aristotle and the inklings. Dr. Phillips, tell our audience just, just a little tease of what this bad boy is all about.
- [09:15]
Dr. Ann Phillips
So you will get to watch me and Jen share the multiple brain explosions that we've had over the last month or so because she taught her class on the. The Literary Theory of the Inklings a couple months ago and it was phenomenal and mind blowing. But behind the scenes, we were talking so much about. Owen Barfield in particular was the one who started this because he quotes Aristotle so much. And so we spent all this time going back and forth about, you know, the Plato and the Aristotle and finding all these connections. And finally we were like, this could be its own class. And realizing how much Plato and Aristotle are underneath everything and how the sort of sharp divide between the two of them, like Plato versus Aristotle, like eternally battling it out, is actually a little bit of a misapprehension. We actually need them both. So we've come to all these really cool realizations over the last. And a lot of them have been like, because we both have children. So a lot of things where we're like up at midnight because our kids are awake, but at the same time we're like having these emotional breakdowns because we're so nerded out about Aristotle. So it's going to be, it's going to be fun.
- [10:30]
Angelina Stanford
I can't, I can't wait. I'm so, I'm so looking forward to that. I've been a kind of eavesdropper on your conversation for the last few months and I'm, I'm really, I'm really excited about all that you guys are going to bring to that. So again, you can find all of that, all the Dr. Phillips has got going on on our website, HouseOfHumaneLetters.com of course you can also find Ann, I should mention, on your sub stack you had been talking about it for a while and then you launched it into the substack fear sphere.
- [11:01]
Dr. Ann Phillips
I did, yeah. In December, which was not really something I ever. I don't know, I. I was getting so many of the same questions from people just multiple Times, like, people. It's like I was getting a lot of emails or, you know, just people asking me questions about what does this mean? Or what does that mean? Where did this idea come from? So finally I was like, okay, it would be helpful to have a space where I can write my thoughts on what X, Y and Z is. And then just like, here's the article. So it's been really helpful for that. And it's. It has grown in a way that I did not expect. As of right now, it's over 800 subscribers, which is kind of wild. And I'm like, a little paralyzed by that because that's a lot of people. So I just am keeping in mind the, like, 10 people that I'm thinking of who, you know, want to know about these things.
- [11:56]
Angelina Stanford
That's what I do on the podcast.
- [11:58]
Dr. Ann Phillips
Yep. I'm just, I'm talking to those people. That's. That's my.
- [12:02]
Angelina Stanford
Exactly. Exactly. Well, you know, you're such a clear thinker and you're an excellent writer. So, you know, if anybody's new to her substack, she. She's wrestling with questions like, what is classical education? What are the liberal arts? You know, all of the things that kind of get bantered around and in the larger conversation. As we've seen classical education become so popular, we have a lot of people who are speaking with a great deal of authority about what is and what is not classical education, who really have no acquaintance with the ancient authors. And you are somebody who not only is well acquainted with them by virtue of your degree, but you read them. You sight read them in the original languages and you bring a context and a knowledge that is. Is sadly missing in, in this conversation. And so we have a lot to learn from you, and I've been enjoying your sub stack. You actually forced me to join just so I could. I fought it for a long time. I'm not going to publish anything. Don't put that on me. I think when I, as soon as I showed up, I got some subscribers and I thought, oh, no, no, I'm not. I'm not really on here. You're going to be sorely disappointed. I'm just here to read Anne's blog.
- [13:14]
Dr. Ann Phillips
Yeah, I guess that's kind of like the point of, like, if you sign up via email, you'll get it in your inbox whether you have an account or not. But. So you can just like put your email in the little now you tell me box. I didn't know you were going to.
- [13:28]
Angelina Stanford
Join, so became like my 94 year old grandmother trying to figure out new technology. It was, it was one of those moments where I was like, I'm not a kid. This is not made for me. I am too old to figure out how to do any of these things.
- [13:41]
Dr. Ann Phillips
Well, that's currently kind of like as a platform, it is. I, even in the short time I've been on there, it has been evolving and I'm already kind of feeling like a curmudgeon. Like this wasn't. It wasn't like this when I first started and now it's. They're doing all these other things back.
- [13:55]
Angelina Stanford
In the old days. Six months ago. Exactly. All right, well, let's get this started officially with sharing our commonplace quotes. Mr. Banks, would you like to kick us off?
- [14:04]
Thomas Banks
Indeed. I have one from one of my favorite Irish authors, Robert Linda, who was an essayist who wrote back in the 20s, 30s, 40s, thereabouts. And a little bit of context here. This comes from an essay of his on the cantankerous English novelist Norman Douglas, who's best known as the author of South Wind, if you remember that novel. And he says that Mr. Douglass is the kind of writer who hurls a pen where King Saul, in a similar manner, hurled a spear. I like that.
- [14:44]
Angelina Stanford
All right, I'm Gonna go next, Dr. Phillips. We'll let you go. We'll let you go last. I chose mine because it had a little bit of fry snarkiness that I thought you would appreciate, dear husband. Okay, so this is from an essay he wrote in 1950 called the Four Levels of Meaning in Literature. And it's an article where he's taking the four levels of medieval reading as expressed by Dante and others, and, and basically explores what would that look like now in literary studies? What would it mean? And he kind of goes through the mistakes that the critics of the 1940s are making where they're failing to take certain things into consideration. It's a fantastic essay. And it ends up. A lot of these ideas end up being sort of reformulated in his later 1950s book, Anatomy of Criticism. But this is a, a paragraph from where he's talking about we're so opposites. You give the little pithy thing and I'm like, here's a full paragraph with a two hour backstory.
- [15:47]
Thomas Banks
We're still in your preamble here in Thanksgiving.
- [15:51]
Angelina Stanford
But he's making the point that he makes over and over that you never study one work of literature in, in isolation, that all literature is building up our understanding of the world of literature. And that is where the real beauty and power of literature comes from. It comes from the whole world of literature. So he's going to make that point again. But then he's going to talk about what happens if you. If you're not doing that. If you're. If you're focusing on isolated books in isolation. Rather than the world of literature. This conception of archetypes is based on the fact that literary education is possible. And that the understanding of individual works of art. Does expand into an understanding of literature as a whole. Individual works of art lose nothing of their individuality. When we realize that they are not a series of bottled feelings. To be uncorked and re. Smelt like perfumes. A person who has attained a mature understanding of literature. Beyond both dilettantism and pedantry. Understands it archetypally. Whether he realizes this or not. I add this last clause because of certain features in modern literature. That have, until very recently. Discouraged critics from trying to understand it on the third level. One of these is the law of copyright. Which prevents a writer from using another man's work on the basis of his own. As Chaucer did this by exaggerating the uniqueness of the work of art. Has developed a criticism of Connorship. Which talks less about literature. Than about the pleasures of possessing books.
- [17:32]
Dr. Ann Phillips
Dang.
- [17:32]
Thomas Banks
Stings, doesn't it?
- [17:34]
Angelina Stanford
Isn't that good?
- [17:35]
Thomas Banks
The pleasure of something Ship. I missed that.
- [17:38]
Angelina Stanford
Connoisseurship.
- [17:39]
Thomas Banks
Oh, okay.
- [17:40]
Angelina Stanford
Connoisseurship. I may have said it wrong. Connoisseurship. I love the idea that. I mean, he's roasting the new critics. He's roasting FR Leavis. He's roasting I. Richard. All the usual suspects here. But I love the criticism that those guys are treating literature as a bottle of feelings. To be uncorked and smelled like perfume.
- [18:00]
Thomas Banks
And put back after consulting the price on the label.
- [18:05]
Angelina Stanford
No doubt. Exactly. And the comment about, you know, you just become the connoisseurs of literature. You don't really understand literature. You become connoisseurs. And you talk more about the pleasure of possessing book Than about understanding literature. It was so reminding me.
- [18:18]
Dr. Ann Phillips
The bottle of wine. Rather than, like, enjoying it.
- [18:20]
Angelina Stanford
Precisely. It reminded me of George Orwell's roast of Effort Levis.
- [18:24]
Thomas Banks
Oh, absolutely. Yeah. Makes that kind of a similar analogy. Yeah. Where he says a bottle of wine. Instead of. He says that. Yeah. FR Leavis has the air of a man who is forever. When he brings out a fine vintage. He's always reminding you of the price of it. Or something like that.
- [18:41]
Angelina Stanford
Right, right, right. I thought you would appreciate that. All right, Dr. Phillips, or Dr. P. As the kids call you, what do you have for us?
- [18:52]
Dr. Ann Phillips
I have a short, pithy one from Arthur Quiller Koosh. And this is Tongue in Cheek. Just in case anybody's concerned, here's the quote. To learn Greek is, after all, a baptism into a noble cult.
- [19:07]
Angelina Stanford
Oh, yes, yes. I love it. I love it. I should have. I should have pulled out some of those C.S. lewis quotes about learning Latin and Greek and what that does for a. For a school boy.
- [19:19]
Thomas Banks
Quiller Cooch was. That was from his the Art of Reading, if I'm not mistaken.
- [19:26]
Dr. Ann Phillips
Yep. I was digging through my commonplace and I don't remember reading it, but I must have because I have several pages of quotes from that and they're all fire quotes.
- [19:38]
Thomas Banks
So he was a fantastic lecturer and the kind of lecturer whose lectures are still very exciting on the page, I find. And also like, oddly, oddly informal. You get his sense of wit and. Yes.
- [19:52]
Dr. Ann Phillips
Yeah, no, he is really funny.
- [19:55]
Angelina Stanford
You know, it's so interesting because you, Dr. Phillips, are a trained classicist, Mr. Banks, you are a trained classicist. And up until just historically, the last five minutes of the humanity's existence, everyone thought that to be educated was to be a classicist was to know Latin and Greek was to. To. To understand those languages, those works, that history. It's a. It's a strange position to be in historically where one has to defend the value of things that have always been understood to be not just valued, but the most important thing. Like there's a. I should have. I should have used this as my commonplace quote. Let me see if I can get this by memory. There was a. So, you know, English Literature only got started to get studied in the 20th century as literature in universities. I mean, it's not until the 1940s that Cambridge has their English department. Like you can find it a little bit earlier here and there, but mostly just studying Anglo Saxon language and studying like the history of the development of the English language, but not studying literature per se. And so there's a Modern Language association article from early in the 1900s. Okay. And the Modern Language association is like the journal for English studies. And the guy says something like, if a boy studies Latin and Greek, he knows he's getting an education, but English literature is for your leisure hours.
- [21:21]
Dr. Ann Phillips
Like. Like ouch.
- [21:25]
Thomas Banks
Oh, yeah. I can imagine him saying something like that, not thinking it was a controversial statement.
- [21:28]
Angelina Stanford
It would have been controversial. What was controversial was people like, you know, George Lyman, Kittredge for example, fighting for English literature to be worthy of study. And that was a battle Lewis and Tolkien had that. You know, all of those guys argued that English literature could be studied with the same sort of rigor as classics. But before we just jump into why classics are your love language, let's start at the very beginning. Tell us. Okay. Like, people are just dying to know, right? Like I just said, no one goes into classics anymore. People don't value that as a degree. And it seems like. It seems like from in the womb you were in love with Latin. So I need to know. Tell us about your early childhood. What were your interests? What kind. What was. Was your family life one that was dominated by books and literary pursuits or language pursuits? Just give us a picture of what that was like.
- [22:25]
Dr. Ann Phillips
Okay. So I grew up mostly in rural Northern California, although I was born in the Los Angeles area. And my dad is an aerospace engineer and he's an immigrant, and so he was in the LA area, aerospace engineer. You know, that he met my mom there. My mom is a musician. She's a piano teacher. So that's what both of my parents.
- [22:53]
Angelina Stanford
I gotta say, aerospace engineer and musician doesn't tell me. Future classicists.
- [22:58]
Dr. Ann Phillips
Well, I know this. There's a reason why I'm bringing all this up, because it's. No, I love it, love it. Like, I'm kind of like, how did this happen? I don't know. So my mom did get a California teaching credential and did a little bit of substitute teaching. And this was in the 90s, like, the early 90s. And that was about the time that the homeschool movement was really getting kicked off. So, you know, certain books were like, the well Trained Mind by Susan Wise Bauer, for example, was published in the early 90s. Some other important books to that movement came out around that same time. So my mom, at the same time that she was having this kind of horrible experience in the public schools as a teacher, found out about homeschooling as an alternative and got into that idea. So then by the time I was born, and then I had. I have two younger siblings, I have a younger brother and a younger sister. She had decided to homeschool exclusively. So I've been homeschooled from the beginning. And I also grew up in a music household. So, like, our main thing, my. Pretty much my entire childhood was music. That was. That was the thing. So my dad was the aerospace engineer who was kind of funding the whole operation with lessons and instruments and all that kind of stuff. So most of My life was wrapped up in music. My mom did introduce us to the, the rudiments of Latin when I was pretty young. Like I vaguely remember I was probably like six, five or six. And we did, you know, like I still remember doing that as a little kid but we didn't actually get very far. So it kind of like ended at a certain point. And then later when I was. I just, just recently found some evidence that I was 12 or 13 when I decided to get back into it because we already had all the books laying around. But yeah, most of most of my life was music. So I started with piano. I was probably like three. One of my earliest memories was playing a Bach invention at a Bach competition. I was like five. I don't know, I was pretty young. And then I switched to violin when I was seven. So like most of, most of my day to day life was wrapped up in practicing. But I liked to read. I don't remember not being able to read. My mom does have stories about teaching me to read. I don't really remember, so who knows? But yeah, so I remember always liking to read. And I have, I found my favorites and I would like reread my favorite books over and over and over again. And that was kind of my way of sort of decompressing from the practicing and the performing and all that stuff. So my parents did have a fair amount of books laying around. My dad likes to read. My dad for being an engineer is still fairly well rounded person. Like he's interested in history, he taught himself biblical Greek and Hebrew. Like that's, he's, that's the kind of person that my dad is. So we've always had lots of books just laying around and you know, my mom was homeschooling us. I mean like I said, the main focus was kind of like music and that was sort of our day to day, like biggest focus. But we did math, we did reading, we did spelling, we did all that stuff. We kind of dropped the Latin fairly early. But I guess the other thing that she did that was that is a core memory for me is she did read the Iliad, the Odyssey and the Aeneid to me before I was 8 years old.
- [26:45]
Angelina Stanford
The real thing, not a kid's version.
- [26:46]
Dr. Ann Phillips
Yeah, the real thing.
- [26:48]
Thomas Banks
That's outstanding.
- [26:50]
Angelina Stanford
Oh wow. So you love affair with Homer and Virgil goes back that far?
- [26:55]
Dr. Ann Phillips
Yep. So that's one of the.
- [26:57]
Thomas Banks
I have to ask you, did you take to the Aeneid at that age?
- [27:02]
Dr. Ann Phillips
I think so because I've always had this sort of love of the Aeneid. I've always like, I don't remember. It's weird to say. I don't remember a time when I didn't love Aeneas as a character. I didn't know about Aeneas and Dido.
- [27:21]
Thomas Banks
That's really interesting to me because I think I've met almost nobody who has responded in the same way on the first reading to Aeneas. Maybe I'm misremembering a few things, but I remember when I first read the Aeneid when I was 15 or 16, I thought he was like the dullest dog in the world and I just had no patience for him. But no, that's interesting that you had, you know, you kind of responded to it at a fairly young age.
- [27:50]
Dr. Ann Phillips
Yeah, I remember always knowing about Dido and Aeneas in particular, like knowing that story, knowing about his descent into the underworld. I remember the ending like getting to the ending very clearly and it was like, because I remember like we would read it in a specific room like at the same time. So like it's very much like this is something that happened every day. Like I don't know how long it took and I know it happened before I was 8 years old because we moved to a different house when I was 8. And I distinctly remember this taking place before we moved to this different house. So that was probably that, that is probably the reason why it was all the Fagles translation, which is why I kind of fond of Fagles because he translated all three. So yeah, we just, apparently she just read straight through all of it with all the blood, guts and gore. I don't remember the blood, guts and gore. I do remember Achilles, I remember Odysseus. I remember the sort of the feeling of the story, like the, the flavor of each story, which is very distinct. I very much remember that.
- [29:01]
Angelina Stanford
So I love everything about that. Right. Because so often we hear from parents with so many questions about age appropriateness, like, well, if I read my 8 year old the Iliad, they're not going to understand what's going on. But they don't have to understand everything that's going on.
- [29:17]
Dr. Ann Phillips
Nope. Right.
- [29:18]
Angelina Stanford
They, they, something has to be alive and them by the book. You know, you give them nothing but a steady diet of eight year old books and they're never going to be awakened by anything greater. And I like what you said about I don't remember the blood and guts. I think a lot of people worry about that. They worry about that with Shakespeare too. Like, oh, oh, there was some innuendo. I'M like Most of my 40 year old students can't pick up the innuendo. And you're worried your 7 year olds are going to know what's going on? Like, yeah, these are not concerns to have, but giving them beautiful language, time tested classics, it does, it alivens you.
- [29:55]
Dr. Ann Phillips
Yeah, I am really thankful for that. And my. I don't ever remember like my entire childhood. I do not remember being asked like moral questions about these things. We just read the books and then when I was more of an independent reader, I just read stuff. My parents just let me read the books and I'm really thankful for that. That there was nobody kind of hovering over me, telling me what to think. Nobody was like, oh well, you know, Odysseus did this. Like, was that a good decision? Was that a good leadership decision like that? That's not the point of the Odyssey. Asking those kinds of questions is so not the point. And if you want to destroy somebody's love of that story, ask them those kinds of questions.
- [30:37]
Angelina Stanford
Amen.
- [30:38]
Dr. Ann Phillips
Just don't even go there. And I'm really thankful that we just read these stories. I was allowed to just enjoy like I got what I got. I don't, I do not legitimately do not remember. Like I reread the Iliad since obviously and was a little shocked as an adult. I'm like, oh wow, that's really very graphic. It's like, you know, death scene or you know, things that definitely didn't make an impact on me at all as a kid that you notice as an adult. But I do remember thinking about Achilles as a character and having an acquaintance with these characters and an acquaintance with the stories. Because then after that I remember I read Dallaire's book of Greek myths over and over and over and over again. I read as much Greek myth as I could get my hands on.
- [31:31]
Thomas Banks
I still tend to picture various of the gods and goddesses in the Dolaer's illustrations.
- [31:37]
Dr. Ann Phillips
Yeah, the artwork for that is beautiful. I used to try to copy some of the art from that book because it is really beautiful art. And yeah, so I enjoyed that. Yeah, I just, I had a lot of, I guess, early exposure to that kind of stuff. Like I still have the copies that my mom read from, which are all beat up. I still have them somewhere. So yeah, I think that that was probably one of the biggest reasons why I do what I do now is just that early exposure. And then like I said, we kind of dropped Latin because there were other things that we were doing and it's probably a good thing that we did because then when I decided this is what I want to do, I just took quietly gathered up all the books and just started doing it on my own. Just I would go, you know, whatever spare time that I had. And I was so desperate to just read and start reading Latin that I didn't care that it was hard. And like, there were definitely points like, tell my students about this all the time. Like, I didn't do everything right. I made a lot of really dumb mistakes because I didn't have somebody warning me about this or that pitfall. I was just so desperate to read things that, you know, I kind of like, charged through. I use wheelocks Latin primarily, but we had some kind of other random things that I cobbled together, and I just charged through wheelocks and started trying to read stuff. And that's kind of what got me going down this path. So. Yeah.
- [33:13]
Angelina Stanford
Oh, that's. That's great. Let's go back to something you said. Because you said, look, I didn't. I didn't understand everything in those books. I don't even remember everything in those books, but I remembered Achilles. I knew Achilles. And that's what I think people don't understand. If you, if you get kids familiar with those characters early, then it's not. You get rid of the intimidation factor. If you're 15 and you pick up the Iliad, because it's just, oh, yeah, Achilles. I know Achilles. Right? And this time you can cycle through and just get so much more.
- [33:46]
Dr. Ann Phillips
Yeah. Because then, yeah, on later rereads, I already had it felt it's revisiting an old friend. Yep, exactly. It did feel a lot like when I had to. Had to quote, unquote, reread these things when I was in college, it was like, oh, yeah, not a big deal. Like, I already, you know, feel very at home with this and already knew a little bit like, you know, because if you go to go to go to college, especially where I went to college, which still has this very strong sort of great books focus. Like, the best thing you can do in a situation like that is to already know the stories. Because then the professors were teaching me about how Homeric poems worked, how the language and I learned the language and I learned to read it in Greek and. Or they were telling me about, you know, the genre, the conventions, the history, all the things that kind of go with that. And that just made it so much better because I wasn't already drowning just trying to learn a story. I already knew all of that. So yeah, that was, that was helpful.
- [34:50]
Angelina Stanford
Yeah. I think we make the mistake of thinking that first exposure has to be the be all, end all instead of just being an introduction.
- [34:59]
Dr. Ann Phillips
Yeah, well, and it's like my whole educational life is. When I look back on it, it just seems super duper messy. Like nothing was planned. Nothing. Well, I mean, there was a plan in so far as, you know, we were homeschooling and my mom sounds like it was alive. It wasn't. Well, and I've kind of realized as an adult as I've gradually had to let go of my desire for, you know, the perfect plan that's going to solve all of my problems. When I finally let go of that and then I was kind of looking back, I'm like, yeah, learning is not linear and education is not linear. There were things that I read as a teenager that I just had absolutely no concept for. But then I came back to it as an adult and I was like, oh, I understand this now, but it's very cyclical and very circular and like loopty loops and it's, it's all. It's going to be messy no matter what. So. But at the same time, I think that is when it is the most alive, when you're getting the most out of it.
- [36:03]
Angelina Stanford
Absolutely. And just because you didn't understand it when you were younger doesn't mean it was wrong to have read it when you were younger. Right. It was all, it was all part of the process. All right, so you're describing a childhood that's very self directed. Really, you're reading and all of that. What were some of the. Okay, so you said Dallaire's Greek myths and you really desperately wanted to know how to read the Latin author, so you taught yourself Latin. You mentioned that you used to just read books over and over. What are some of the, like, do you remember your childhood books that really stood out to you that were your favorites?
- [36:38]
Dr. Ann Phillips
Yeah, I actually went out to my shelf over there and I made a list because I still have most of them. So probably, I mean, when I was maybe 7, 8, starting around then I started. So like the Trumpet of the Swan was one that I would read on loop. Stuart Little Charlotte's Web. So like I would read those over and over again. A Secret Garden and a Little Princess by Frances Hodgson Burnett, I would read those on loop. I have my Grimm's Fairy Tales from when I was a kid. And it's like a Barnes and Noble book that doesn't state who the translator is. So I have no idea. But it's. Knowing what I know now, it is still a faithful translation, but I read Grimm's Fairy Tales over and over again. I had a collection, another, like a Barnes and Noble collection of King Arthur stories that were adapted from La Mort Arthur by Thomas Malory. So.
- [37:31]
Thomas Banks
And what's really interesting, John Steinbeck's by any chance?
- [37:34]
Dr. Ann Phillips
It doesn't say John Steinbeck's front, matter of fact. Okay, that's interesting. Yeah. I don't know. It doesn't say. I looked in the front matter to see and it was.
- [37:43]
Angelina Stanford
And what it said, if it was Steinbeck, because it would still be in copyright.
- [37:47]
Dr. Ann Phillips
Yeah, it doesn't say so. And what was really interesting about that one to me as a kid is that one preserves all the archaic language like the these and the thous and the. I walked not. Yeah, I don't know, because it's. It's still written and it's. You know, they didn't really adapt the language. But I remember as a little kid being, like, utterly fascinated by that because I was like, oh, that was like my first introduction into the concept that language evolves and kind of realizing, so this is what English used to be. Like, how did we get from that to this? So I started getting interested in those kinds of questions, like, how did that happen? So that was one that I read a lot. I had Leon Garfield's Shakespeare stories. Somebody gave that to me for Christmas when I was 10 or 11. And I read that all the time. I did read, like, I read plenty of, you know, stuff. Like, I read every Magic Treehouse book. Like, every single one, every single Nancy Drew book, every single Hardy Boys. I read a lot of those.
- [38:55]
Thomas Banks
That's a commitment right there.
- [38:56]
Dr. Ann Phillips
I know.
- [38:57]
Thomas Banks
There must be hundreds right there. Yeah.
- [38:59]
Angelina Stanford
Wow.
- [39:00]
Dr. Ann Phillips
Because one, we would go back and forth between a couple of different libraries and, like, I would ask to go to the library that had more of whatever book, like, whatever Nancy Drew books or whatever I was reading. Another series that I would read on loop is the Trixie Belden series. And I almost convinced myself that it doesn't exist because I have never found it.
- [39:23]
Angelina Stanford
It exists. It exists. My mother had the whole set.
- [39:26]
Dr. Ann Phillips
I had a whole set. It's gone now. I don't know what happened to it.
- [39:29]
Thomas Banks
They obviously made an impression on you. I confess, I did not like the Hardy Boys. I tried them on. I think my mom and dad gave me one of them for Christmas or something. I read it. I didn't like it. What, like, was the appeal there for you?
- [39:44]
Dr. Ann Phillips
I didn't like them as much as Nancy Drew. I will say that. Yeah, they weren't. I kind of just read them because they were there.
- [39:53]
Thomas Banks
Sure. Yeah. That's a fun.
- [39:56]
Angelina Stanford
Just in terms of the puzzle, it's fun.
- [39:58]
Dr. Ann Phillips
I enjoyed sort of seeing how things would unfold because, like, with the Nancy Drew books, like, I did have a handful of Nancy. Like, specific Nancy Drew books that I would reread a whole bunch of times because I, like, liked the atmosphere.
- [40:11]
Thomas Banks
Yeah.
- [40:11]
Dr. Ann Phillips
Like the. The Secret of Shadow Ranch. I would read that one on loop just because I liked the setting. Like, the Hardy Boys was. It was. That was like, more things where I didn't know how it was going to unfold. So even though I didn't like them as much.
- [40:26]
Angelina Stanford
Yeah.
- [40:27]
Thomas Banks
It was the Hardy Boys themselves I disliked.
- [40:29]
Angelina Stanford
No, I didn't like. They were a little too good. I liked it. Yeah. Yeah, yeah.
- [40:34]
Thomas Banks
Like, you couldn't have.
- [40:35]
Dr. Ann Phillips
Too squeaky clean.
- [40:36]
Thomas Banks
Yeah. It was to.
- [40:37]
Angelina Stanford
Of course, you would object to that.
- [40:39]
Thomas Banks
Well, yeah, it was to.
- [40:41]
Angelina Stanford
Much more grit in his children's literature.
- [40:43]
Thomas Banks
Yeah. Some more vicious behavior. But it was Churchill's line, he has all of the virtues I despise and none of the vices I admire. That was kind of how I responded to the Hardy Boys.
- [40:56]
Dr. Ann Phillips
No, that's. That's fair. And that's probably. I mean, Nancy Drew was like that, too, where she's very. She's very squeaky clean. And it's. Everything's just like. There's nothing morally questionable about the main character. And, like, it's very clear, like, the bad guys and the good guys. Like, it's all very, like, you know, clearly delineated that way. I mean, I read those largely because they were there. I did read a lot of those, like, great illustrated classics, which is.
- [41:21]
Thomas Banks
I had some of those, too. Yeah.
- [41:23]
Dr. Ann Phillips
Yeah. That was, like, my first exposure to books like Robinson Crusoe and Ivanhoe. And that's how I learned that I loved Ivanhoe was I read the. The abridgment first, which, at the time, I wasn't really aware that it was an abridgment. I didn't. I don't think I really understood fully what that meant, because then I read Ivanhoe later and was like, my jaw was on the floor because it was so good. I read Harry Potter, and Harry Potter was my long practice session read because they would sit open on the music stand and I had these binder clips, and I would open the book with the binder clips on the bottom of the music stand and flip the pages and Practice and read. And Harry Potter was helpful for that because when you have to practice scales for an hour a day, at least that made it better.
- [42:20]
Angelina Stanford
I just have to say, I want, I want you to finish your list. But I just have to say every time you list another title, in my head, I'm thinking, oh, yes, my kids loved it. All my kids had that one too. I'm like, wait, that's right. I forgot. I could be your mother. You are so young. I could be your mother. Yes, those are, those are, those are the books my kids had, which I'm.
- [42:38]
Dr. Ann Phillips
Sure in a lot of thick. This is, this is a very common experience for lots of people because, you know, these were the things that were available.
- [42:44]
Angelina Stanford
But it's fantastic. I mean, you're, you're ticking off all the building blocks of stories right there. You know, the myths, the fairy tales, the fables, the legends, completely without knowing it.
- [42:54]
Dr. Ann Phillips
Like, my, my parents gave us lots of books and had lots of things around. It wasn't necessarily because they were consciously like, well, no, but, but every.
- [43:02]
Angelina Stanford
But that was the tradition that was handed down. Like my grandparents. None, none of my grandparents could have told you these are the building blocks of stories. But all they, like my grandparents had sets of like, you know, I'm sure your grandparents did too.
- [43:14]
Thomas Banks
Like, we inherited one. Yeah, but like great grandmother.
- [43:16]
Angelina Stanford
Yes, we did. Yes, we did. But, but not those, like sets of what are classic stories for children. Like, I remember my grandmother had a set. Yeah, it was stuff like that. And you pulled it out. And I remember there were like Bible stories in it and there were King Arthur stories and there were some myths and like, people just knew that's what you give kids. We are the weirdos. We're the first generation that's like, ew, I don't want a bunch of old stories. We need new stories.
- [43:39]
Thomas Banks
So you get my 7 year old a paranormal vampire novel or a paranormal.
- [43:44]
Angelina Stanford
Alien novel, you know, because no, King Arthur women don't have agency in those. We need modern books. Yeah, yeah. That's why you're. Yeah, that's why your parents gave you that. Okay, what were some others?
- [43:56]
Dr. Ann Phillips
Like, I read stuff like the inheritance cycle. I did read the first Twilight book because I was like, what's the big deal? Because I had like just come out when I was kind of like, like tweenager, sort of. I didn't get it. I didn't like it. But I think probably because at that point I'd already been exposed enough to good books that I was just kind of Like, I mean, I wasn't, like, I didn't absolutely despise it, but I was just kind of indifferent to it. Like, whatever. I don't get why people like it, but whatever.
- [44:25]
Angelina Stanford
We are going to talk about that. Go ahead, finish your sin.
- [44:27]
Dr. Ann Phillips
I want to park here for you. Some of my other things. Like, I remember I was a big fan of Diana Wynne Jones. To this day, Howl's Moving Castle is one of my favorite books in the whole world.
- [44:37]
Angelina Stanford
It's wonderful, no, that is a fantastic book.
- [44:40]
Dr. Ann Phillips
You know, I read lots of history books. Like, I went through an ancient Egypt obsession, like everybody does. I went through various, like would like hyper focus on a specific thing. So when I was maybe like 13 or 14, I like fixated on the age of sail and like went down that rabbit hole. So, yes. And then as I got older, I started reading like I read Jane Eyre for the first time. I read Wuthering Heights. I read David Copperfield. I read twice, like twice in a row because I loved it so much.
- [45:11]
Angelina Stanford
That was a huge favorite of mine as a kid.
- [45:14]
Dr. Ann Phillips
Yeah, it's. I love David Copperfield and like Les Mis. I was very conscious of, like, there is a body of literature that I need to read. And I did have a little bit of this, like, in order to be an educated person, I had this, this sense from all of my prior reading that, you know, this is what educated people read. And I wanted to be part of that. You know, I wanted to be educated in this sort of humanistic kind of way. So I just was reading all this and this was before the library where I grew up got really weird. Like the, all the like, weird young adult stuff was starting to seep in, but it really hadn't like exploded the way that it has in the last 10 to 15 years.
- [45:58]
Angelina Stanford
Because we've decided young people don't need. Right.
- [46:01]
Dr. Ann Phillips
Well, because like David Copperfield and Jane Eyre were in the young adult section of my library. That's where I found those.
- [46:07]
Angelina Stanford
I read David Copperfield at 12 and loved it.
- [46:11]
Dr. Ann Phillips
Yeah, it's. And I, I didn't have any trouble, trouble with it. I read it, understood it, loved it, read it multiple times. So it was like, kids are capable of reading all this stuff. It's like, you know, we kind of. I think we underestimate what kids are capable of reading.
- [46:30]
Angelina Stanford
Let's, let's come back to your twilight comments. No, no, no, this is good. This is good though, because this is something parents really are afraid about is what happens if my kid gets a hold of A not good book. And one of the things we try so hard on this podcast to say, drawing from C.S. lewis's experiment and criticism, but it's still a scary thing for parents.
- [46:50]
Dr. Ann Phillips
Yeah.
- [46:50]
Angelina Stanford
Is that the idea is not I have to put all the right books in front of my kid, it's that I have to teach my kid to be a good reader. That is the emphasis. And if your child has become a good reader, they won't like the bad books. And so your experience there, where you read Twilight and you're like, eh, I'm not really interested in continuing because you had been fed all the best and this just wasn't satisfying. And that was the exact same experience that I had with my own children. And I remember when my daughter, who's just a little bit younger than you, she had gone to Barnes and Noble with my mother, and my mother was, you know, she was being really nice, Grandma, I'm going to take you out for a treat and buy you a book at Barnes and Noble. So my daughter comes back with the Fault in Our Stars.
- [47:37]
Dr. Ann Phillips
Oh, yep, I read that one too.
- [47:39]
Angelina Stanford
And, and she was. And I was like, oh, I, I. And here's me trying to be not judgmental, like, oh, oh, I didn't know you were interested in that book. She's like, well, mama wanted to buy me something. I was like, okay. So I didn't say anything. And then a few weeks later, I think she came to me, or I don't remember if I asked her. She came to me, but she said, oh, I never even finished it. She's like, it just, it just wasn't good, mom. And, and she couldn't even. It wasn't like she gave me a book report and articulated these are its flaws. It's just, it just didn't taste good because, you know, she was used to real food and she had been given.
- [48:10]
Thomas Banks
Some, some cancer romance novel.
- [48:13]
Angelina Stanford
Right?
- [48:13]
Thomas Banks
Yeah.
- [48:13]
Angelina Stanford
Right? Yeah. I can't remember everything she said. She, she did, she did give me, I think, a semi rant about it. She didn't, she didn't like it. But it was one of those moments in my life where I just thought, yeah, I don't have to worry about this. I don't need to worry about, oh, no, what if my kid gets their hands on a bad book because it's about an entire life's literary experience and it's about becoming a good reader and then the bad books don't, they don't have that appeal. And no, I'm not saying Twilight or the Fault In Our Stars is morally wrong for you to read. That's not what I mean by bad book. I just mean it's not only if.
- [48:47]
Thomas Banks
You like them and think they're good books.
- [48:49]
Angelina Stanford
No, it's not high quality. It's not high quality literature.
- [48:52]
Dr. Ann Phillips
Yeah. I mean, I read more than my fair share of schlock as a teenager because didn't we all. Didn't we all once. For me, the benchmark of what I liked was the stuff that I would read again. So like I read Looking for Alaska, like all the John Green books I read, you know, the Fault in Our Stars. I read the first Twilight book and other. Whatever random things were like the. There, There are other series. I won't name them, but like, I read all that stuff, but I just never like, came back to it. It never left a lasting impression on me in the way that, like Jane Eyre. I still, like. I can feel that. Still like that experiences. That was one of my first like real deep literary experiences. I can still feel it somewhere in my being like that the impact that Jane Eyre had on me the first time that I read it. And like, I couldn't stop reading it. So there were. I. I knew the difference between the books that were. Really had that impact on me versus the ones that were just kind of like, it's sort of like eating cotton candy. It's like, it's okay. Occasionally it's. And. And you're not gonna feel good after a while. But, you know, other books like, you know, David Copperfield or Wuthering Heights or whatever, that felt like, you know, meat and potatoes were not.
- [50:09]
Angelina Stanford
That's exactly right. Like, I. I don't even know if I could have articulated. I still struggle to articulate it, but to me, certain books I read felt heavy in a good way. Like solid, you know, like I'm in something solid here.
- [50:24]
Thomas Banks
Here's one to be chewed and digested.
- [50:26]
Angelina Stanford
Yeah. And then other things just felt light to the point that it's evanescence. It's, it's. It's Dew in the Sunshine, you know, like, it's just, it's fleeting and it. So I'm not saying it was morally wrong for me to read those light books. It's just that it didn't have any lasting impression on me because it was, it was just very of the moment.
- [50:48]
Thomas Banks
If I could pitch in, since we're in your teenage years here, did you ever have that moment that I definitely went through this? Where you started looking around for titles to read not necessarily because you thought you would Enjoy them, but because you thought they would be provocative and slightly bother the adult authority figures in your life.
- [51:06]
Angelina Stanford
Were you a secret rebel like my husband here?
- [51:09]
Dr. Ann Phillips
Honestly, no. Because my parents were just so not supervising my reading life at all.
- [51:13]
Angelina Stanford
Oh, no. Yeah, no, thank you.
- [51:15]
Dr. Ann Phillips
I didn't really have. And I didn't.
- [51:18]
Angelina Stanford
You And I though, Mr. Banks, we had the added benefit of we read things to, to irritate the people at our school.
- [51:23]
Thomas Banks
That's true. It never worked for me though, really. Like, like the adults just kind of ignored me. They just, you know, they knew how to deal with a kid like me. And it's like, oh, really? You're reading a French existentialist. That's great, Banks. You know, where's your homework? Oh, you forgot again. Yeah.
- [51:39]
Dr. Ann Phillips
Yeah. I wasn't. We weren't part of any co ops. I wasn't part of any kind of. Like, I have one really close friend from my teenage years who's still like one of my best friends, but I wasn't, you know, in a group. And he also was homeschooled, so. But like, we just didn't have that sense of like a community. And you know, my parents, like I said, weren't really. I guess they just trusted me enough to not worry that I was going to be, you know, imbibing bad morals from whatever. And they, I think they. The other thing that was really important, I think, and kind of key to my very accidentally, Charlotte Mason education was that I would go on really long hikes with my dad and I would narrate things to him, which again, was not something that anybody in my house had any concept for. It was just like, I was very interested in history and I got very interested in all, like, intellectual things. My dad is. He's very well read. He really likes. He's a native French speaker, so he's read a fair amount of French literature and knows a fair. And we have a lot of interesting family history on his side because they go all the way back to the founding of Quebec. So there, there was. And we would talk about. So I grew up reformed Protestant and my dad, as an adult made the conscious decision to stop practicing Roman Catholic and become a reformed protest. So that's how I was raised and educated. But we talked about it a lot. Like, we talked about the history of religion a lot. We talked about all these kinds of things. So I would just talk about whatever I was reading or we would talk about history or whatever. And I think that was really important because I don't remember. Here's the thing. And for those of you who are in the trenches of homeschooling your own kids, I don't remember at all the, like sitting down at a desk doing worksheets. Like, I know that happened. I like, we. I still found like math worksheets from when I was a teenager, but I don't remember those things. What I do remember though, was going on this one incredibly difficult hike with my dad that was like an 8 mile round trip hike, but talking about the French Revolution on that hike. And I remember that very distinctly and just that kind of thing. So that, you know, I had a relationship, like an intellectual relationship with my dad where we would talk about ideas, we would talk about things like that. And that's my dad. Was he also really with me in particular? Probably partly because I was the oldest child and because my parents did recognize that I was bent a certain way, he did insist that I do, you know, a fairly formal biology, chemistry and physics course. And he directed it. So he. Because he does science for a living. So for him it was no big deal. And he also made me go all the way through calculus, which at the time I was really annoyed about. I was like, why do I have to do this? I don't. I knew from the time I was 11 or 12 that I was gonna get a PhD, but I knew it was gonna be in something to do with the humanities. So by the time I was in high school, my dad was like, you need to do calculus. I was like, when am I ever gonna use calculus? Like, why? But I will say, in case my parents are listening to this, I am grateful for it. There was one time in grad school when having some vague knowledge of calculus was actually helpful. But yeah, so that was, yeah, that was important to my dad because he, he has a fairly kind of liberal arts influenced mindset about. He wanted us to be well rounded. And he also did teach us and talk a lot about how all knowledge is interconnected because he sees the patterns in the world, he sees the patterns in science, he sees the patterns in math, but he also can see the patterns in languages and in stories. And so I think where our minds met, particularly as he's coming at it from this very, you know, STEM perspective. And I was coming at it from a very humanities kind of perspective. But, you know, we were able to connect on those kinds of topics and that was really valuable. So talk to your children, have those kinds of conversations about ideas. I think that's what they're going to remember a lot more than like, we all sat at desks between 9 and noon and we did an hour of math and an hour. Like, I don't remember that well.
- [56:32]
Angelina Stanford
And also the conversations, they're spontaneous and I think that we overthink it so much and they. What are some good discussion prompts from my kids? Like, no, no, no, no, no. If you have, if you, if that's how you're approaching it, it already doesn't work. Don't go buy a book that says These are the 10 questions you can ask about any. None of those artificial things, things work. Growing up in a. Because your upbringing is so much like my own. Growing up in a family that loves ideas, that all these conversations are spontaneous. Same thing driving in a car, hiking, walking. And. And I just had a lot of questions. I had a lot of things to say and ask. My dad also just would read a ton of history and we would just have spontaneous conversations. Same with my kids. You know, we, like, I don't, I did I think, go through a small period where I was like requiring some kind of like official narration, but it worked much better when it would happen spontaneously. I don't, I don't. By spontaneous, I don't mean I didn't plan for it. Like, I wasn't paying attention to it. It's more like I would. If I like gave my kids a narration prompt, they were going to have so much performance anxiety that it was going to shut them down. But if it was, if it came up naturally, like, oh, mom, this book I just read. And there was this thing in this thing and like I felt at one point I teased them that every time they went to the movies, they came back and they were giving me these long, basically like, you know, analysis papers just off the top of their head because they needed to break down the movie and what they thought about it.
- [58:00]
Dr. Ann Phillips
Yep.
- [58:00]
Angelina Stanford
And I would think to myself, no, this is education. They are thinking, they're connecting, they're synthesizing, they're analyzing, they're presenting it to me. You know, if I try to make it some big formal thing, it's just going to ruin it. So. Yeah, so you had this just amazing.
- [58:14]
Dr. Ann Phillips
Liberal arts upbringing with very unselfconscious about it. Like, there's a lot of people who are very self conscious about it. And it was, it was not like nobody was talking about it that way. That's just kind of what happened. And I, looking back on it, I'm like, okay, I can see why it worked, quote, unquote. And again, I'm very much against this Idea that you can in any way deliberately control the outcome of these things. And, you know, my siblings and I are all very different from each other. Very different. My sister is an artist. She doesn't, you know, she's interested in very different things than me. And my brother is interested in very different things. But at the same time, we're all very close. We can all talk about, like, my brother's the movie guy. He loves, you know, like you said, analyzing movies. And he's very good at it and he's really good at the, the art of narration. But that was not something that happened because my parents were like, all right, now write an essay about, you know, why this movie messed up this and that. Like never. That never happened. It was exactly the word.
- [59:24]
Angelina Stanford
It wasn't self conscious. That's what I meant by spontaneous. I didn't make them self conscious about it. I didn't say, give me a narration of the movie. We just had that kind of family where we talked about everything and, you know, so much of what you're describing. You will read this sort of thing in any number of biographies, right? Like this is Dorothy Sayers upbringing. So, you know, we read about a Dorothy Sayers very similar to yourself. You know, a powerhouse mind, an academic whose education basically consisted of she had access to her father's library and she was able to pursue what she loved. And so I think what happens is we hear a story like that and then we're like, yes, see, homeschooling works. You just give kids access to a library and then we start homeschooling. We're like, but I need a curriculum and I need to make, you know, 14 step plan here and, and we just suck all of the life giving things right out of it.
- [60:12]
Dr. Ann Phillips
Yeah.
- [60:13]
Angelina Stanford
Okay. So before we leave your high school years to go into college though, I, I absolutely have to ask you this. You're a writer. You're a good writer. You write on the sub stack. We read it. But you wrote. You've written many an academic formal paper. You wrote a dissertation. One of the big fears that we hear over and over from our audience is but how are they going to learn to write if I'm just letting my child read widely. But surely I need a writing curriculum. What's your answer to that? Because I know you didn't have a writing curriculum and yet you can write just fine.
- [60:48]
Dr. Ann Phillips
Nope. I read a lot of books. I did a lot of my own personal, private writing of various things. Like I remember when I was, I don't know, 15 or something I was like. I got really into Michel de Montaigne, which I probably shouldn't say that out loud because I'm gonna sound like such a prig. But I got so fascinated by the essay and the concept of the essay that I started trying to write my own, like, quasi philosophical essays, which I probably burned them. They were probably horrible and really pretentious sounding. So I'm glad none of this survives. But I did a lot.
- [61:25]
Thomas Banks
I actually imitated Montaigne too, exactly once. And I realized it was a bad. I had read his essay on Thumbs. So I. This is when I was like 18. So I wrote an essay on Big Toes, but it wasn't. It didn't have any of Montaigne's. I've long since thrown it away, but it didn't have any of Montaigne's spontaneity or his ability to connect, you know, very disparate subjects or anything like that.
- [61:49]
Angelina Stanford
But you're both saying something again that you read about. Many writers say they learn to read by trying to imitate things that they read. Okay, and what do we do with that? We say, oh, see, imitation, that's how you learn to write. I'm going to turn this into a curriculum. Right, we turn it into curriculum. We're going to teach you five steps to how to copy an essay. No, no, that's not how any of this works.
- [62:11]
Dr. Ann Phillips
Yeah. And so, yeah, in my experience, I did a lot of. I wrote a lot of fiction. I tried my hand at writing poetry and like, I'll just again, completely on my own, didn't have anybody telling me what to do. And like, I would show things to my dad on occasion. Like, you know, I would write something and my dad would read it and critique it a little bit or stuff like that. But for the most part it was very hands free kind of thing. And what I think was really valuable about that is that I learned that I didn't have to think in a box. The problem with the five paragraph essay format is it really confines your ability to think coherently about a topic. And I didn't have any of those kinds of constraints. And I was reading all this stuff. And I did go through phases where my, you know, depending on who I was reading, my writing would kind of reflect whatever I was reading. Like my most recent substack, I'm like, well, I've been reading Aristotle. I can tell. So that's a very normal and natural part of writing, is you kind of assimilate what you've been reading. And when I got to college, so I will say. And again, I wouldn't say any of my papers in college or grad school were especially brilliant. There was a lot of. I did have a learning curve to go through, but all the formalities of writing, like my first English class in college with Patricia Bart, who was a phenomenal English professor, she has you walk through the process of writing an academic paper, and the first thing she makes you do is she makes you do what she did when I was there. You write a prospectus. And she required that all the formatting be correct. And I didn't know how to do any of that. And so of course I got it back and it was all marked up. She liked the idea, you know, this is a good idea. But, like, all my formatting stuff was wrong. But over the course of that semester, I learned and it was not a big deal. That stuff is very easy to learn. What is much.
- [64:19]
Angelina Stanford
That's the thing. I don't know why all these parents think that there's. There is not an. This is not 1932. There is no expectation that you already know how to write formal essays when you get to college. That is not the case anymore. They will teach you. Yeah, what you're saying, that was my experience too, with my kids. If you, if you, if your kid gets into a program where he needs to learn, and I do not believe everyone needs to know how to write formal essays. Okay, that's nonsense. Not everybody's an academic. You were going to be an academic. You needed to learn how to write this. They taught you full stop, the end.
- [64:51]
Dr. Ann Phillips
That's how. And it was not hard to learn. Learning how to write in MLA or Chicago or Turabian or whatever. That's not hard. What is harder is if you've already been, like, confined by you, you have. Your paradigm of thinking about literature is like, was Odysseus a good leader or not? That's really confining. And I taught at a university and I taught a writing class for six years while I was in grad school. And the directions that I was given as a TA were very much like asking these types of questions. And I gradually just kind of stopped doing that because I didn't think it was helpful. And I ended up seeing better results when I stopped trying to confine the students in these little boxes, because at least what I had is I had the freedom to be able to think more broadly about a topic and to connect things that weren't necessarily, you know, I was able to make sort of bigger connections Because I wasn't thinking in these sort of. You know, that's the hardest part of.
- [66:00]
Angelina Stanford
Writing, is having good ideas.
- [66:02]
Dr. Ann Phillips
Yeah. And. And that was the part I never had trouble with.
- [66:05]
Angelina Stanford
That's right. Because your mind was full of all these books. And that's the super weird thing to me right now about conversations around writing, especially in the classical education realm, is they're all focused on form and not content. We're going to teach you the form. And I'm like, that's not what they need. They need ideas. All right, let's move forward now. You're in college. You're pursuing a degree in Latin and Greek. By its nature, you're doing a lot of reading. You're reading the classical authors, history, poetry, prosecution, and you're reading them in the original language. That sounds like that's very intense. What is your literary life like at this point? Are you almost entirely focused on your academic work and reading for classes and writing? Are you also having time to read on the side, or are you experiencing burnout? What's going on in college?
- [67:00]
Dr. Ann Phillips
It probably kind of depends on the era of college. So coming to college cold out of a home school program, like, my freshman year was rough. Not academically so much. It was really rough socially because. Because the. The other really important aspect of all of this that I haven't talked about as much as my musical training had continued all through high school. And I had a very, very good teacher. She's based out of Los Angeles, and, like, she sends kids to Juilliard. Like, that's the caliber of teacher that she is. I never aspired to that, but she was an absolutely brilliant teacher and really good at breaking things down and explaining the principles of things. And so I have all that in the background kind of going into college. But I just feel like a lot of what made college possible for me is that I had a music scholarship. And so what ended up happening when I was in college is I was always torn between the music stuff and Latin and Greek in a way that, like, I was burned out a lot of the time because I had to be an orchestra. I had to be taking lessons, I had to be in. I had to do recitals. I did. I taught music students while I was there. I was very heavily involved in the music department and all that stuff. I was, like, doing the concerto competition, so I was, like, prepping, you know, like my senior year, I was, like, prepping the Tchaikovsky violin concerto, and I was, like, kind of dying, but also. And, like, preparing for grad school applications. All that. So, like, a lot of the time I'm like, very much torn between those two things. So I think most of the time I'm actually really thankful that everything that I was reading for class would have been stuff that I was probably going to read anyway, like the Divine Comedy. Like, my first English class, which was a great books class. We read the Odyssey and the Aeneid, and then we read Beowulf, we read the Divine comedy, we read T.S. eliot, we read all these, like, Gerard Manley Hopkins and William Blake. We were reading all this great stuff. And My English professor, Dr. Bart, she made it come alive for me. She was absolutely amazing. And that helped a lot. Where I felt like I was excited to go to her class because I would learn really cool things about this literature. And so. And I was also very excited by, like, my freshman year was the class we read Cicero and Plautus. And then my second semester we read Horace and Livy. And I was just like completely enthralled with all of that. I was. And then so I had taught myself Greek the summer before college because I wanted to start reading Greek as quickly as possible. Which meant that my second semester, freshman year, I was in the Widom out Homer class, which started with 12 or 13 people, went down to four at the end. And that class was a lot of work, but I was like. So like I said, enthralled with it. I loved it. I loved every second of it, even though it was really stressful and a lot of work, a lot of reading. So I just. Most of, like, my college experience was probably kind of unusual and that I had phenomenal professors, really good programs that I was in, and that made me excited about all of this. And I've always had this sense of, like, this is what I'm supposed to do is this is. This is what I'm here to do. I did have to take some classes that I really hated. Like, I did have to take a kind of like baby math class because I didn't have any AP credits. I didn't clep out of anything and none of that. So I still had to take all their.
- [70:50]
Angelina Stanford
Not necessary. People worry about all of that. Not necessary.
- [70:53]
Thomas Banks
Actually, here's a question I wanted to ask you. In either in your undergraduate or graduate level work, did you ever discover a particular branch of classical literature, A genre or an author that you really did not like?
- [71:08]
Dr. Ann Phillips
That I did not like?
- [71:10]
Thomas Banks
Yeah, because everyone. I definitely had that experience. Oh, who was yours when I was. I mean, I've never been to graduate school. Of course. But as an undergraduate, the first time I read Thucydides, I did not enjoy him.
- [71:24]
Dr. Ann Phillips
That has changed since then.
- [71:27]
Thomas Banks
I really enormously respect Thucydides now. I've taught him a couple of times. But, yeah, I did not enjoy the Peloponnesian War.
- [71:39]
Dr. Ann Phillips
Okay. My first author that I was like, I don't like it was Sallust who wrote. We read. We had a class where we read. Yep. And the bellum Catalina. I'm staring at my copy from that class, and I did not like Sallust. And then I had to do another Sallust class where we did pretty much the exact same thing in grad school. And I was like, I still don't like Sallust very much. Not on the Latin side, on the Greek side. I despise Greek novels.
- [72:08]
Thomas Banks
Oh, yes.
- [72:09]
Angelina Stanford
Oh, yeah.
- [72:09]
Thomas Banks
You and I have talked about this before. Yeah, Yeah.
- [72:12]
Dr. Ann Phillips
I like Lucian because he's funny and ironic and satirical about it. But there are other things, these ancient Greek novels where I'm just like, why? Who took the time to copy this?
- [72:22]
Thomas Banks
The Byzantine monks, evidently. The. They were quite, quite popular reading. The Ethiopica and others were very popular with the. In the Byzantine scriptoria. So the monks, we can thank them or blame them if you want to.
- [72:37]
Dr. Ann Phillips
I mean, further. And I didn't actually have to read much of that. I didn't have to read Greek novels in college. It came up more in grad school. But, yeah, for the most part, though, I remember my first Plato class being really stressful. That was my sophomore year. I took this Plato. We read book one of Plato's Republic, and we read Isocrates. So Isocrates, different from Socrates. Socrates, different guy. But we read those two. And the class was really good. The professor was really, really good. But it was, you know, my first exposure to Plato in Greek, and it was really. That was really hard. I remember the end of that semester just being like, I was curled up in a corner of one of the buildings just, like, sobbing because I was trying to study for the final and it was really hard. I remember that. And I particularly fell in love with the historians, so Herodotus and Thucydides and Livy. Livy and Tacitus. I took classes for all of those in college and just absolutely love them. And again, amazing professors like, to my. My Greek professor was Joseph Garniops, and he was. He was great because he was just very inspiring. He's very good at, like, making you feel so motivated. And then the other professor is Gavin Weir, who I had him for both Latin and Greek classes, and he was so careful and precise and very. Just a phenomenal teacher. He was really good at breaking things down. And he's the voice that I hear in my head now a lot of the time when I'm teaching my own classes and I'm telling students about this or that grammatical thing and I'm remembering how he talked about it. So kind of passing down their. Their legacy a little bit. So, yeah, I had overall, really, really good experience in college.
- [74:32]
Angelina Stanford
Well, let's go ahead and move you up to grad school, because I'm looking at the time and we were just having such a good time chatting away. We're gonna be a four hour episode, but. So you graduate from Hillsdale, you get married, you're in graduate school, you have two children. This is a recipe for burnout here. So you're pursuing, you're pursuing your love. You're gonna write a dissertation on Herodotus, you're doing what you love, but you're also in the university system as a teacher and seeing what that's like. And it's not good. And there's lots you could say about that. And you have children, so you have a lot of pressure. So talk to me about what happens in grad school in terms of your literary life, not your full academic life, but you hit some pretty hard burnout and you get really disillusioned with the way academics talk about literature. Not necessarily in your classics department, but in, in. Just tell us about it.
- [75:24]
Dr. Ann Phillips
Yeah, so, like, in college, my. My call, my academic life and literary life were pretty much the same. This, like, indistinguishable. Just. I had a great time in college. And then, yeah, grad school was a totally different story. So I went from a small, liberal arts, predominantly Christian student body college where I actually had, you know, related relationships with the professors and all that. Like, you know, it was more human in that way. And then I went to grad school that has, you know, 30,000 people on campus every day. It's just, you know, enormous. You're just a number. You're not really human. You're just a number. And I will say my experience with the Classics department at UCSB was really, really good. They're very professional. I had a phenomenal advisor, a really good dissertation committee, and I have nothing bad to say about them. I love them. But the larger university system is a mess, and it was ideologically. So I got there in 2017, which is kind of when things politically were getting kind of crazy. So I had a front row seat to watching a lot of the ideological stuff kind of unfold. And then I was being made to read for classes. Derry Doll and various, you know, theory, you know, theory driven things. And I got very depressed because it was such a different. Like we were reading these texts that I love theoretically, and then we were imposing all this theory on it, post.
- [76:58]
Angelina Stanford
Postmodern theory, we should say yes.
- [77:00]
Dr. Ann Phillips
So lots of deconstruction, lots of, you know, all that kind of stuff. And I was surrounded by people who unironically believed most of it or, you know, we're influenced by it in some key way. So I felt very alone and very, you know, again, no shade on the people that I worked with directly at all. It's more just. It's an environmental thing. I just felt like I couldn't really. I couldn't really articulate what I thought about various things. I just, you know, felt very out of place in a lot of ways.
- [77:38]
Angelina Stanford
And I think people don't understand that in higher education. It is not a bunch of people who love this stuff. It's a bunch of people who hate this stuff and teach it and teach it. Literally teach classes about how this is such hateful stuff and they make a career out of that. And so many of the people who find the podcast have the same story of. I'm getting from the podcast what I had hoped to get from college, but. No, you don't. You don't. If you're, if you're thinking you're going to go to college and sit into professors who are going to teach you how to love these things. No, that is not what they'll do. They'll teach you how to hate it, how to deconstruct it, how to tear it apart.
- [78:13]
Dr. Ann Phillips
Yeah. And, yeah, so. And I kind of avoided some of the, Like, I was pretty careful, like, who I took classes with and like, where I invested my energy to where that was least likely to be the case in classes and in mainstream classics more broadly. There's a lot of, yeah, why are you here if you just hate all this stuff? But the reason why a lot of them are in that field is because they are actively trying to destroy it. There is one guy who's kind of a big name in classics right now where he has stated that that is his goal.
- [78:47]
Angelina Stanford
Talking about.
- [78:48]
Dr. Ann Phillips
Yep. Yeah, that is. His goal is to kind of destroy classics from the inside. I met him.
- [78:53]
Angelina Stanford
That is the death of a culture right there.
- [78:55]
Dr. Ann Phillips
Yeah. And it was really sad to me because it's an, you know, he is not. I don't know, very smart guy and all that. But I'm just like, why? It doesn't. That doesn't do anybody any good. Doesn't do you personally any good. And then, you know, there's somebody like me. I'm just sitting there, like, taking all. I took as much time as I could to just privately, on my own, keep reading. But I got to a point where I was so depressed. And it was about six months after my daughter was born, and this was in late 2019. So, like, October, November, around that ballpark. And that's when I found the podcast, the Literary Life Podcast. Because at that point, I had gotten so disconnected from, like, I. I started to kind of hate reading. I started just being like, is this all there is? Because I'm like, what am I gonna do after grad school? Like, there's. I'm. You know, and everybody is like, oh, academia is dying. There is no job. So I was constantly being told, there's no place for you in academia. There's no, you know, the money is drying up, all those kinds of things. So I was just kind of like, what am I going to do with this? I'm here because I love this stuff, but I'm being told, you know, all these things, like, you know, how awful it is or how, you know, we need to rethink this or reclaim that. So I. Yeah, I got to a point where I was just like, yeah, really depressed about it. So then when I found the podcast and you guys were going through Gaudy Night, or at least that's where I started, was the Gaudy Night series, which, like, spoke to my soul on so many levels because I am married with children and also an academic. And Gaudy Night just goes straight to the heart of that conflict and what it means to be an intellectual female. And after that, I. It was like, things got so much better because then I felt like, no, there's. There is something else out there that's better than all this. There's more than just this. So I, like, listened religiously every week for, I don't know, however many, you know, three or four years, like, until close to the end of grad school and I joined the Patreon in 2022 or something like that. So I was kind of just, like, in the fandom for a long time. But, yeah, the. The Literary Life podcast saved my sanity in grad school, because then I felt like, okay, I'm like a secret rebel now. I'm, like, subverting academia, but, like, in this very quiet sort of way, because. And you were. That's how I learned about Northrop Fry. That's how I learned about all this stuff that I kind of have joined with you guys in exploring all the.
- [81:34]
Angelina Stanford
Stuff you should have learned in a.
- [81:36]
Dr. Ann Phillips
Graduate school, which I'm sure, I am almost certain that Northrop Fry was mentioned by somebody. When I was in college, I just wasn't ready for it, which makes me kind of sad because I just was not, not ready for it. And there were lots of things that I was just like. I wasn't ready to read lots and lots of things until well after college and, well, like the Divine Comedy. I read it in college and I liked it, but it didn't. I was just not ready for it. And I was not ready for a lot of things. But then once I was in grad school, I had some more life experience and had more of the very explicit, I mean, training, for lack of a better, you know, in how to. How to think about literature and how to think about these things. Then it was like everything started to take off. I started making all these connections. I started seeing the bigger picture in ways that I never had before. So, yeah, that's kind of.
- [82:36]
Angelina Stanford
I remember you telling me that the. The stuff you were learning from the podcast made its way into. Into your dissertation.
- [82:42]
Dr. Ann Phillips
It did, yes. So the. My dissertation was specifically about cross cultural interactions and Herodotus histories. And the way I was looking at the whole. The work as a whole, as a sort of unified narrative and, you know, connections being made between different parts of it was very much influenced by, like, the way, like, all the stuff that I was learning from you guys about Northrop Fry was very much how I started looking at the histories. And it opened things up a lot for me. And I really. My dissertation was probably the, like, the single thing of, like, all the papers and, you know, random things that I had to write for grad school. I think I. My dissertation is the one that I'm like, yes, that was. And I took a lot of. And I don't want anybody to think that it was just like this, you know, straight shot or anything. Like, I took a lot of criticism. My writing, what you see now on my side substack that people like so much. A lot of that is attributable to a lot of critique and a lot of very thorough and sometimes very difficult to bear emotionally criticism from my dissertation committee. And I'm very thankful for it. It was very painful at the time, but I went through all of that. Lots of Criticism and lots of, you know, you need to rethink this, or, you know, you said that already, or this doesn't really work, and, like, that kind of stuff. So a lot of that was very, very important for me as well.
- [84:18]
Angelina Stanford
So it's so interesting to me what happened to you when you found the podcast on a number of levels. Like, yes, it's easy for me to imagine that we sounded like a voice of sanity after the grad school voices, but it's also interesting to me, and we hear this from so many people that when they got into the podcast, they. They will. They say, I feel alive again. And I know that. I know that we all live frantic, modern lives and all of us are stretched thin and busy. And I know that there's a lot of people who say, oh, I can't keep up with the podcast. I'm not reading the books. But what's interesting to me about what happened to you, I mean, I'll just be honest. It's hard for me to imagine there's anybody listening to the podcast that was as busy as you were when you found the podcast.
- [85:08]
Dr. Ann Phillips
I read all the books.
- [85:09]
Angelina Stanford
That's right. You were a wife, you were a mother of two small children. You were working. You were an academic writing your dissertation. Sorry, I've been there. And at that grad level where you're presenting academic papers and you're working on your big project, which is, like you said, being raked over the coals by the professors and everything, and you're gonna have your comprehensive exams, like, that is the most intense thing to go through. And you did it with two children, and yet you've made time to read the books along with the podcast because it was life giving to you, and you were really, really struggling at that time. And I don't say that in a way like everybody should be listening to the podcast, but just you.
- [85:52]
Dr. Ann Phillips
We.
- [85:52]
Angelina Stanford
We all have to make really hard choices all the time about how we spend our time. That's just modernity. We don't. We're not in the Andy Griffith Show. Most of us don't have lives where we're sitting around loafing, but we are able to make decisions. And. And this is worth investing your time in because it will pay you back. Having a literary life will pay you back. It'll make you more alive, it'll make you more fully human, and it'll make you more able to do the other things that you have to do that so hard. It's, you know, it's like one of those things, like you know how hard it is to get healthy when you're not healthy. Right. Like, if you're chronically ill, you don't have the energy to do the things to get not chronically ill. It's like that. And it's like that intellectually and spiritually. But you have to take those baby steps. You have to open yourself up to those things. And it was really interesting for me because you did join the patreon, and you were very open about what was going on in grad school. Of course I noticed you, and I felt a kinship to you because I was also a female academic who had gone through so many of the same struggles you were going through. And it was just really interesting to have a front row seat to all of that. And you shared so much, and it meant so much to me that the podcast and that the work that I was doing was helping somebody that I saw so much of myself in. It was almost like, hey, you're helping a younger version of yourself. And, you know, we've. We've talked and, you know, I won't go on to all the things, but we have similar stories of. Of experiences in grad school. And, I mean, that's the reason why I chose Gaudy Night as the first book on the podcast. And not everybody was happy with that decision, but I stand by that. You did stand by that decision, because all of the women that I look like as. Look at as younger versions of myself, they found the podcast through that series and loved it for all the same reasons that I did. And I'm glad that was our introduction, and I'm so glad you found us.
- [87:56]
Dr. Ann Phillips
Yeah, I mean, it was very hard. I'm trying not to. Not to cry now, but one of the things that I noticed is it's really easy when you kind of let. Let it get this way. It's really easy to just only see what's ugly and bad. And I was on a college campus. I saw ugly all the time. Like, not just like, the architectural ugly, but, like, I dealt with students all the time. Like, I dealt with crazy situations all the time. And it was really easy to get into this. Like, all. That's all I would see. And everything just started to look so gray and so pointless. And then gradually, with, you know, reading all these books and seeing all these connections and going through this, like, things started to be beautiful again. Like, life started to be purposeful again. It's. It changes how you see. Like, you could be looking at the same hillside for years and years, and then what I noticed is that it started to change. Like it was exactly the same. Like there was nothing changed about it, but it just started. Everything started to look different after a while. And I think a lot.
- [89:09]
Angelina Stanford
I always say literature gives you new eyes to see. And that's what you're describing.
- [89:13]
Dr. Ann Phillips
It really does. And I know what it's like to be in the hole of, like, everything is pointless. Why am I doing this? Like, everybody hates this. This is, you know, this is the stupidest thing. And we're constantly being told, you know, humanity's people are stupid. And you know, what was my alternative? Like, I'm not, I was not interested in like the neoclassical education space because they're just as bad and they hate this stuff just as much as anybody else. They just pretend not to.
- [89:40]
Angelina Stanford
They, they do pretend. They. Let me clarify this statement before we get with that. I know what she means. What she means is if they truly loved it as itself, then they would be able to talk about literature as literature. Instead, they only talk about literature as a means to talk about all the other things they want to talk about. And they.
- [89:59]
Thomas Banks
At the same time, there's a lot of people, people in classical schools who are doing like serious work in the trenches, who have a genuine affection for the material and shouldn't be classic debunkers.
- [90:08]
Angelina Stanford
Totally agree. Totally agree. When, when I attack classical education, I'm not. Well, no, I'm going to say this. I'm not attacking the teacher in the trenches. I am attacking the so called leadership.
- [90:17]
Dr. Ann Phillips
Yeah, no, that, that's because what I was looking at as a potential career is like, I'm being told, you know, normal academia is totally off limits. Limits for all kinds of reasons. And I was kind of looking at like some of these larger organizations that are, you know, like, trying to recruit people like me. And I was just looking at the organization. I'm just like, no, I can't do that either. Like, I just don't agree with this. I don't agree with the, like, the very overtly political angle of all of it. Again, no shade on, like, I know lots of. I have very good friends who are in the trenches who do love this stuff and are trying to do good work. But, you know, this is like the leadership. A lot of, A lot of this. I just, I don't, I don't agree with a lot of.
- [91:01]
Angelina Stanford
Then that's of course how you ended up working for us.
- [91:05]
Dr. Ann Phillips
I know somebody dropped a hint that y'all were looking for a Latin teacher, so I sent my cv.
- [91:11]
Angelina Stanford
No. And you Were. You were an absolute answer to prayer. You were an absolute answer to prayer. And you have exceeded all of our wildest expectations. You've become such a part of the family, truly. And so, as we wrap it up, you're a Still a wife, still a mother, you're homeschooling your kids, you're working for us. How would you characterize your literary life right now?
- [91:40]
Dr. Ann Phillips
Right now. So, yeah, I mean, my whole life revolves around reading in some way, but it's all very. It's like prepping for this mini class with Jen has been really great because we're reading all these things and we're reading them together. Or, like. And then, you know, the. The various, like, voxer chats. Like, the voxer chat with you, and we're, like, dropping ideas in there, and it's like this constant, like, flow of ideas. So I. I always feel very excited to read. Excited for another day of, you know, finding out new things. And so I read a lot and I read. And I don't just read for work either, although it doesn't.
- [92:16]
Angelina Stanford
Yeah. I was gonna ask you, what's your. What's your fun. What's your pleasure read? I. I say fun. I have to put in quotation marks because my daughter used to always say, mom, are you reading for work? Are you reading for fun? And I never knew how to answer that. The answer was always yes.
- [92:29]
Dr. Ann Phillips
Right? Yeah. So, like, a lot of the reading that I do for work is also fun, but, like, my very not, you know, not related to work reading. Like, I just recently reread Howl's Moving Castle. I've. I reread a bunch of the Dorothy Sayers mysteries. I really enjoy those. Been reading the CAD File series on and off.
- [92:54]
Angelina Stanford
Oh, yeah, those are fun.
- [92:56]
Dr. Ann Phillips
Yeah, I love. I love those.
- [92:57]
Angelina Stanford
Detective novels are my guilty pleasure books. They're always. Well, they're not even a guilty pleasure. They're my. They're my light fun reading.
- [93:04]
Dr. Ann Phillips
Yeah, no, I like those, too. And James Harriet. I mean, a lot of the stuff that I read is also very much like, none of this will be a surprise to lit life people that. A lot of my fun reading is stuff that, like, ideas that I get from people in the. The Patreon and the Discord, so.
- [93:25]
Angelina Stanford
Well, you're such a valued member of that community.
- [93:28]
Dr. Ann Phillips
Oh, I appreciate that. Well, no, we.
- [93:31]
Angelina Stanford
But we have a fantastic group of Patreons.
- [93:33]
Dr. Ann Phillips
Such a lifeline when I was finishing grad school, so I could just be like, okay, there's people that understand, like, how crazy this is. And it was. It was really helpful.
- [93:45]
Angelina Stanford
It's been a real joy to watch you come out of that and to blossom and to regain your childhood loves again. It's a shame. I know it's going to sound like I'm overstating it, but it's such a shame and a painful thing to think about. How many people go into the university to pursue the liberal arts because they love it, only to come out of this it hating it.
- [94:11]
Dr. Ann Phillips
Yeah.
- [94:12]
Angelina Stanford
Have to have that love destroy. I mean, even if you don't hate it, okay. Like, some people are going to get into it and hate it and do the whole thing. I would say most people are probably not coming out hating it. They're coming out demoralized.
- [94:23]
Dr. Ann Phillips
Yeah.
- [94:24]
Angelina Stanford
They're coming out thinking, what is the point of all of this? And also, I hear people saying things like, I wondered if I was crazy, that I loved it.
- [94:33]
Dr. Ann Phillips
Yeah. I went through that for a bit there, where I'm like, okay, why? Why do I like this so much? But, yeah, it is really sad because there are a lot of people, and frankly, a lot of people go to grad school because they don't have anything better to do.
- [94:45]
Angelina Stanford
That is very true. We have a glut of PhDs. Why? You can't get a job anymore.
- [94:50]
Dr. Ann Phillips
Yeah. Yeah. The market is really oversaturated. And, yeah, a lot of people are, you know, and everybody's trying to do, you know, the. The rethinking or reclaiming thing, and it's just gotten old and it's not. That's not exciting anymore. That was maybe exciting 40 years ago, but nobody cares now. It's like, okay, whatever.
- [95:05]
Angelina Stanford
Well, no, I mean, what's old is new again. Because one of the things I loved about what your dissertation committee said is that you knew you were taking the ideas from the podcast and applying it to Herodotus, which are very old ideas. But your committee was like, this is so fresh. This is so original.
- [95:19]
Dr. Ann Phillips
Yeah, my external committee member was. She called it novel, and I was just hilarious.
- [95:26]
Angelina Stanford
It was a super traditional reading.
- [95:28]
Dr. Ann Phillips
Yeah.
- [95:30]
Angelina Stanford
But that's hope for all of us, though. Genuinely. It's hope for all of us because we've lost the tradition for so long now that if you. If you go into academia restoring it, you come off looking new and novel and fresh and, oh, isn't this interesting? We can pursue this now.
- [95:45]
Dr. Ann Phillips
So you just have to be not very explicit about it. You just have to, like, this is. You know, don't use any of the buzzwords. Don't use any of the, you know, the, the fancy phrases, you know, or the, the theory terminology and yeah, nobody's really going to know. And they're like, oh, this is cool. This is different. So that's what I learned from that. Again, I had a phenomenal committee. So it's, I was very much, I was very blessed by the committee that I got to work with, which again, I'm not saying that that's going to be everybody's experience. I have plenty of stories where, you know, for other people where it didn't go so well. So I was very fortunate in that way. So I want to make sure it's very clear that the people that I worked with directly were wonderful. You know, I wouldn't agree with them on a lot of things ideologically, but that didn't really matter because it was a very professional relationship. So. Right.
- [96:41]
Angelina Stanford
I think sometimes, especially in the climate that we're in now, when we take an ideological opposition to someone, it can come across to people as if it's a personal attack and it's really not. I mean even what we said about class classical education, I mean, you're entirely right, Mr. Banks. I've got no beef with anybody teaching at a classical school. No, no, my, my, my passionate beef as, as Ann's is as. And I appreciate you tempering that, but our beef is with the philosophy, the theory of literature that is being espoused in conferences and curriculums and articles, that kind of thing. And, and that's what the podcast is.
- [97:18]
Thomas Banks
Textbooks that need not be named.
- [97:20]
Angelina Stanford
Exactly, exactly. And, and so this podcast exists this to offer a different approach to literature. And of course we know that a lot of classical school teachers listen to this podcast and take our classes and take what they learn and go back and use it in their schools. And, and you know, and I'm all for that. And, and I'm very, I'm very supportive. It's just like with public schools. The public school teachers are in there and they love the kids and they're working hard for no pay. But it's the system, it's the ideology, it's the philosophy behind it that's wrong. So yeah, please don't, don't misunderstand is here. I, Right. I, I, I support the teachers in the trenches and I have a lot of is anger too strong a word toward the administration that overwork the teachers that don't give them the support that they need and, and, and bishes you like.
- [98:06]
Dr. Ann Phillips
Yeah, that's right. For trying to do things a little differently or to maybe you Know, not use the, the crazy strange discussion questions like, you know, all that kind of stuff. No, I have lots of, lots of friends in that space and I do feel for them.
- [98:21]
Angelina Stanford
We will no doubt revisit many of these things in our what is Classical Education episode, which might end up turning into a series. But you know, Ann, it's just been so great to talk to you today and to let our audience get to know you. And you are, you are a hugely valuable member in the Patreon, a hugely valuable member of the HHL team. And just personally to me, a good friend, you know, like you, I have a mind that needs, needs to be fed almost constantly. And you, you, you, you've all, any conversation I have with you, my brain is pinging and I'm learning new things. And you know that you and Jen, watching you and Jen has just been a delight. I'm very excited about your upcoming mini class, the Great Divide. Plato, Aristotle and the Inklings. You gave a talk at the conference, which you can still get those conference recordings and I highly recommend that so you can find out about everything Anne's got going on@houseofhumaneletters.com you can look at her year long classes, Latin and Greek, her mini classes, her previous what she did a webinar on Herodotus for us. Her conference talk again. You can find her on substack, you can find her on the Patreon. Join the Patreon and we'll talk your ear off on the Patreon.
- [99:32]
Dr. Ann Phillips
I have to reign and in.
- [99:33]
Angelina Stanford
Every time somebody's like, wait, explain Plato. And then I'm like, and stop.
- [99:37]
Thomas Banks
Stop.
- [99:37]
Angelina Stanford
You're teaching an entire play doh. Class in the comments.
- [99:39]
Dr. Ann Phillips
Stop.
- [99:40]
Angelina Stanford
Stop. But your obvious love for your subject matter. And you're, you're, I mean you're just, you're just, you're a natural teacher. You want people to understand. You want to share your love. You want people to understand why this stuff is valuable. And that's what just makes you such a great teacher.
- [99:55]
Dr. Ann Phillips
So thank you all of that. Thank you so much. This is.
- [99:58]
Angelina Stanford
Thank you and thanks. Thanks for whoever watched your kids so that you could sit down and talk with us.
- [100:02]
Dr. Ann Phillips
Yeah, I know my neighbors are great. It's, it's a good time over here. I have really good neighbors.
- [100:07]
Angelina Stanford
Mr. Banks, any final comments from you?
- [100:09]
Thomas Banks
None, but thank you very much, Dr. Phillips. This was wonderful.
- [100:12]
Dr. Ann Phillips
Thank you.
- [100:13]
Angelina Stanford
This was. And stick around to the end of the podcast because Mr. Banks is going to read one of Anne's favorite poems. All right, well, Anne this is for you. For anybody else listening to But Ann, keep crafting your literary life because stories will save the world. Thank you for listening to the Literary Life Podcast brought to you by our loyal patreon sponsors. Visit HouseOfHumaneLetters.com to find Angelina and Thomas and to sign up for our newsletter with podcast schedules and more. And keep up with Cindy at Morning Thomas. Join the conversation at our member Only Patreon Forum or our Facebook discussion group. Visit patreon.com theliterarylife to find out how you can sponsor this podcast and get great bonus content. Don't forget to subscribe, rate and review and check out our sister podcasts, the New Mason Jar and the well Read Poem. And now for a poem read by poet Thomas Banks.
- [101:26]
Thomas Banks
Telemachus Remembers By Edwin Muir 20 years every day the figures and the web she wove Came and stood and went away. Her fingers in their pitiless play beat downward as the shuttle drove. Slowly, slowly did they come with horse and chariot, spear and bow, half finished, heroes sad and mum came slowly to the shuttle's hum. Time itself was not so slow, and what at last was there to see? A horse's head, a trunkless man, mere odds and ends about to be, and the thin line of augury where through the web the shuttle ran? How could she bear the mounting load, Dare once again her ghosts to rouse? Far away Odysseus trod the treadmill of the burning road that did not bring him to his house the weary loom, the weary loom, the task grown sick from morn to night, from year to year the treadle's boom made a low thunder in the room the woven phantoms mazed her sight. If she had pushed it to the end, followed the shuttle's cunning song so far she had no thought to rend in time the web from end to end she would have worked a matchless wrong. Instead that jumble of heads and spears, forlorn scraps of her treasure trove, I wet them with my childish tears not knowing she wove into her fears, Pride and fidelity and love.